For this first attempt, I’ve collected fragments from notebooks, letters, emails and postcards to friends and family, which, I think I can say, sum up my first month living in France (I hope I’m not breaking anyone’s trust in my sincerity by cutting up what I wrote to you and pushing it on the internet, friends. I still meant it for you.)
I don’t know if it was lack of sleep, dehydration, or the dry, recycled air of the plane’s cabin stealing its way into my lungs, but in a state of half-asleep reverie that night I missed you so hard I ached. It wasn’t until an hour before landing at CDG, when the civil war drums of “Perth,” the opening track off Bon Iver’s recent s/t, seemed to announce the arrival of morning in Paris, that it hit me what sort of journey I had hastily begun earlier that day; and it wasn’t until track three that I realized all would be okay.
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I work about twelve hours a week here. The rest of my week is generally spent trying to find time and motivation to study for the GRE, doing errands (which always takes a while without a car), trying to catch up on the happenings of the real world (which is tedious with limited internet access), and preparing for my classes. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have an MMA course at the military school next door—I really lucked out with the chances of that happening. My hours are often spread throughout a day, with a gap of one to three hours between classes, or sometimes I only have classes in the morning, so working just a few hours often takes up half a day or an entire day.
The school itself, in response to Catholic resistance and a need for a school for the children of military officers, was built out here in the boonies in the 1970s, the era of the renowned “Modern” style of architecture (ring a bell, Greeners?). Following suit, all the buildings are drab, concrete rectangles of scholastic seriousness. Joy!
I work with high school age people from the French equivalent of Freshman/Sophomores to post-Baccalaureate, kind of community college-ish, but more job-oriented, students of 18 to 22—my age. I have only half the class each week, for 55-minutes, so my work is in two-week cycles. It’s an interesting mix of levels of English ability and various levels of self-consciousness in using their spoken English, with the younger students often more willing to speak than the kids closer to my age!
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Outside of what I've been doing: how I've been. I miss people, connectivity: feeling connected with people’s lives. There are days when I'm fed up with the tedious little details of working and living at a (French?) high school, and would like to vent to a friend, in English on Skype, but can't. There are times when I tell myself I should drink less, and spend my money on honest things, and other times when all I want is a strong drink. There are feelings that I’ve felt before and there are those that are new, and not always pleasant smelling. Yet, too, there are moments, frozen, when I can but stand, slack jawed, staring at a piece of stone, at how tangible, how old it is, and how important it must have been for people so long ago to have moved something so large. There are nights when I lie awake in bed, starting at a bare light bulb, feeling isolated deep in the geography of a foreign land, and there are nights when I drink from 0.39€ half-liter cans of German lager, playing cards with the roommates and I laugh and laugh and laugh.
My roommate Jimmy is thirty years old but this is really his first incidence of spending any time away from home, and he misses Piura, Peru, he tells me, like I miss burritos, Streets to Ride, your smells and crinkled brows.
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Send me letters and postcards, friends. Draw me pictures. They will paper my walls, and I will stand, slack jawed, staring at pieces of paper, at how tangible, how real they are, and how important they must have been for people so far away to have sent them here.
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P.S.
